If your phone isn’t on the list, don’t worry. Ant adds: “We’re also looking at uplifting some of our other devices running 4.1 direct to 4.3.”

On the subject of updates, Sony concedes that the rollout of Jelly Bean Android 4.1 for 2012 Xperia devices wasn’t “as succinct or as timely as you might’ve expected”, but offers an explanation in the form of this frankly colossal article on Developer World.

Fredrik Ekstrand, Head of Software Product Management at Sony Mobile, yells: “Since the ICS days, we have improved our cooperation with Google. Even though we haven’t seen the new Android 4.3 source code until it’s publicly released, we now get some information from Google about what areas will be updated before the public push through the PDK.

“The PDK was introduced by Google to help us and other manufacturers speed up the upgrade process. This means that we can plan our software upgrade projects more in advance, as we know roughly what parts of the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) we need to update.”

The problem is uk operators are too slow in releasing the updates even if Sony does launch one. The best bet is to root and hope that someone hosts a generic ROM for 4.3 but then although this is relatively easy, it's not for your average consumer.